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Supercomputers Help Researchers Find Two New Kinds Of Magnets (phys.org)
"Predicting magnets is a heck of a job, and their discovery is very rare," said a mechanical engineering professor at Duke University. But after years of work synthesizing various predictions, material scientists "predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models." An anonymous reader quotes Phys.org:
The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed. Although magnets abound in everyday life, they are actually rarities -- only about 5% of known inorganic compounds show even a hint of magnetism. And of those, just a few dozen are useful in real-world applications because of variability in properties such as effective temperature range and magnetic permanence...
In a new study, materials scientists from Duke University provide a shortcut in this process. They show the capability to predict magnetism in new materials through computer models that can screen hundreds of thousands of candidates in short order. And, to prove it works, they've created two magnetic materials that have never been seen before.
"The first alloy is particularly interesting," reports the International Business Times, "because it contains no rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire." But a Duke mechanical engineering professor points out that "It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to materials scientists moving forward."
In a new study, materials scientists from Duke University provide a shortcut in this process. They show the capability to predict magnetism in new materials through computer models that can screen hundreds of thousands of candidates in short order. And, to prove it works, they've created two magnetic materials that have never been seen before.
"The first alloy is particularly interesting," reports the International Business Times, "because it contains no rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire." But a Duke mechanical engineering professor points out that "It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to materials scientists moving forward."
But I thought we are already mining asteroids for these elements? Are you telling me that technology always improves and that we don't need such 1960s fantasies as space mining?
"It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to scientists making drinking wagers moving forward."
fixed that
which means they won't release anything that doesn't help the already rich. It's how they be.
TFA seems to leave out a lot of important geeky details. Like which supercomputer was used? How many hours of CPU (or maybe GPU?) time was used? Since they were running hundreds of models in parallel, why did they need a supercomputer at all? Wouldn't it have been more cost effective to rent compute servers in the cloud?
... rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire."
or
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26687605 (amongst others) that claim Rare-Earths are not rare and by extension not necessarily expensive or even very difficult to acquire.
Which is it then? Who should we believe?
Was the point of this to find new magnets by using computers, or by using newly created material to verify computer algorithms?
That's like your QA team making better products to test the inferior product meant to be sold.
Duke University's Gender Studies Department used the supercomputer to discover two new genders previously unknown to gender scientists. And in a complementary study, their English Department is planning to research possible new pronouns. Go Blue Devil Supercomputer!
fucking magnets. how do they work?
on that no rare earth materials page. One I understand. But three?! Cacaphony of GTFO no matter how good of a read the article may have been.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
After 20 Billion years of compute cycles the evidence is CLEAR.
Magnetism can exist in two mutually independent states of existence: Do Magnate and Don't Magnate.
When the two states of existence come in field contact they annihilate each other producing a third state of existence: No Magnate.
QED
Jajajajajajajajjaaja
I just don't get something about permanent magnets.
A magnet exerts force, no?
Exerting force requires energy, no?
Where is the energy in a magnet? How is it obtained, stored, replenished?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
One of the magnetic (actually anti-ferromagnetic) compounds discovered was Mn2PtPd. Pt and Pd are two orders of magnitude more rare than the "relatively common" rare earths...
Typical deceptive title. /. is really going to the dogs.
...until you find magnetic materials suitable to mass produce tokamaks.
More titel, pop-sci exaggeration. We dont know enough about the formation of these lattices to truly just calculate these new compounds. It MAYBE helps a chemist intuition but its only as good as the science that goes into the calculation - and right now we simply cant predict even the simplest systems. That dosnt stop people trying though.
The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials
No, it doesn't. This is screening, and regardless of how much those in the field of drug "design" and materials "design" use those words, it's not Design, and it's not Engineering. It's Discovery, and it's great that physics and computation have gotten to the point where we can actually discover useful things in silico much faster than at the bench. But engineering requires an understanding of the underlying relationship between materials composition and desired quantitative property, and that is largely still lacking. If it weren't, you'd be screening 10s of compounds, not ~10^5.
Discovery and prediction are fine, no one will complain about the gold you get from panning for it. But don't dress it up in misleading language--true materials engineering and design are still a long way off.
Rare earth metals are not scarce material. They are metals that occur together in nature and take a lot of effort to separate.
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Upvoted for being just the right combination of snark, logic, exasperation and on-point critique.
You, SouthernDandy, do not win the internets today, but you struck a palpable hit!